Self-Organizing Geography

The deficiencies of any kind of central planning are exposed by comparison with the paradigm of complex, evolutionary systems. Ideologically, market-democracies borrow that paradigm, subject to the distortions imposed by economic and political concentrations of power that seek control of resources. Economic space-time (geography) is a resource very much subject to such would-be concentrations of control by “top-down” forms of planning. In the U.S. particularly, the dichotomization of “land use” and “transport” planning and the ongoing contention about how such planning should be allocated and supported by models, illustrates the divergence between the ideological theory and contention for control. This paper traces some history of that contention and offers the scale hierarchy as a prescriptive framework that respects both the evolved governance hierarchy and the distributed preferences and uncertainties such governance must accommodate.